Sceptical about Bjorn

Bjorn Lomborg, the sceptical environmentalist, has published a new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. In it, he argues that there are more immediate concerns that we should focus our attention on: malaria, HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, drinking water, and so on. In The Globe and Mail (Sept. 29), Alanna Mitchell ripped into Lomborg with a review titled "The Pollyanna of Global Warming", calling his book "deeply dissatisfying, ignorant and shallow".

In high-school biology class, we used to do an experiment with fruit flies. You put flies and food in a jar, screw the top on tight and wait to see what happens as the flies reproduce like mad. The goal is to see at what point the limits of the jar - air, food, space - begin to affect the ability of the fruit flies to exist. At some point, the jar becomes inhospitable and the flies die en masse. If Bjorn Lomborg ... were to write up that high-school experiment, he would focus on the point just before the flies began to hit the limits. He would wax on about how the population of flies had never been stronger, trot out statistics to show how astoundingly well the population had reproduced over time, and gush boyishly about the excellent living conditions in the jar. ... Given those facts, examined at that specific point in the arc of the experiment, he would have drawn the correct conclusions. But he would have missed the facts that the food supply was getting low, that the air was becoming fouled and that fruit-fly catastrophe loomed. In other words, he would be correct on carefully selected points of fact, but fatally incorrect about the larger picture, or the meaning of the information he was looking at.